LinkedIn Top 25 Skill trending 2013-2014

I looked up this year's top skills for LinkedIn - the top skills across *any* field that got people hired, and it was pretty interesting to compare with last year's list. As a professor of Marketing, it has implications for the courses I teach, but I think it's also relevant to employee development at agencies, as well as trends in demand.

Anyway, I took the graphics from 2013 and 2014, highlighted marketing-specific areas, and the most interesting thing to me was that social media marketing dropped entirely off the top 25 - in 2013 it was #1. (I don't think it has vastly changed in popularity, but it can be considered a core area in digital marketing, which is #16).


(Click on the above to see a larger version, I've also included the years separately below)




Some highlights for me:
  • Business Intelligence jumped from 11 to #6
  • Digital Marketing as a "general" field dropped to 16 from #7
  • SEO/SEM jumped onto the top 25 at #5
  • "Marketing Campaign Management" jumped onto the top 25 at #12
  • These are the top skills of any field that got people hired, not just IT/business.
To me, this reflects the continuing rise of analytics, and I agree with the interpretation in the 2014 article, and "technical marketing" seems to be a good way to capture it:

Rise of the technical marketer. In 2012, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan predicted that by 2017 CMO’s would be spending more on technology than their CIO colleagues. With digital, online, and SEO (search engine optimization) marketing skills in our global top 25 this year, there’s strong evidence that this prediction may be coming true.

As the rise of tools to manage marketing continues to evolve, the technology grows, and the technical skills required to manage it continue to be in demand. I think the trending also reflects "ROI" - where the demand for analyzing return on investment continues to grow.

For example, there has always been a need for SEO/SEM, and marketing campaign management, but it seems that the tools and technology surrounding these areas is probably driving the need for more skills in this area. In both areas, the complexity of managing marketing campaigns has increased, and tools have emerged to make it easier, so there's continued growth in SEO/SEM, but also growth in the tools.

And it looks like Marketing Campaign Management most likely refers to overall cross-channel marketing, or "cross-tool" marketing, being able to step back and look at the overall campaign, using multiple tools -- or using tools designed to help automate, such as Marin, Kenshoo, etc.

-Todd

For reference: